rearrange columns using awk or cut command

Question

I have large file with 1000 columns. I want to rearrange so that last column should be the 3rd column. FOr this i have used,

cut -f1-2,1000,3- file > out.         


        

Answer 1

A shell wrapper function for awk' that uses simpler syntax:

# Usage: rearrange int_n [int_o int_p ... ] < file
rearrange () 
{ 
    unset n;
    n="{ print ";
    while [ "$1" ]; do
        n="$n\$$1\" \" ";
        shift;
    done;
    n="$n }";
    awk "$n" | grep '\w'
}

Examples...

echo foo bar baz | rearrange 2 3 1
bar baz foo 

Using bash brace expansion, rearrange first and last 5 items in descending order:

echo {1..1000}a | tr '\n' ' ' | rearrange {1000..995} {5..1}
1000a 999a 998a 997a 996a 995a 5a 4a 3a 2a 1a 

Sorted 3-letter shells in /bin:

ls -lLSr /bin/?sh | rearrange 5 9 
150792 /bin/csh 
154072 /bin/ash 
771552 /bin/zsh 
1554072 /bin/ksh